Recent Media

amberite and I recently went to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and while Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still my favorite supers film and also the one I think that is the best, this came in a close second. GotG2 had all the send of fun of the first film, but removed a few of the action scenes and replaced them with more character interaction and fun, well done dialog. Also, it twice did something that I found both surprising and wonderful – it use a big action scene as background – both in the first bit with the huge monster and baby Groot running around, and for part of the final big spaceship battle inside the planet, we saw the battles in the background, while other (more interesting) character stuff happened in the foreground.

From my PoV, this is a brilliant decision. For at least the last 5 years, any vast battle or other fast action + explosions scene anyone could imagine can be filmed, and as a result, to get the same impact and the same visual "wow", film makers have had to go ever bigger and flashier, and eventually that gets very old and tired. Using flashy action as a background is brilliant antidote to this. In addition, it was a fun film that was humane, easily passed the Bechdel Test, and was filled with callbacks to all manner of Marvel space comics. I loved it.

I also loved the Supergirl finale (or more accurately, the last 2 episodes of the season (titled Resist, and Nevertheless She Persisted, because this show knows precisely who their audience is). As a whole, the show has its heart in the right place, but is fairly mediocre, because almost none of the cast has any acting talent, or if they do they certainly aren't demonstrating it here. However, the first 2 episodes of this season featured Tyler Hoechlin playing the absolute best Superman I've ever seen in any media, and Calista Flockhart being utterly awesome in every scene. The 2 episode finale had less Tyler Hoechlin, but Calista Flockhart made up for it by being even more awesome. In these grim days, I enjoy watching Supergirl, but w/o Calista Flockhart, it's definitely a guilty pleasure, since it's simply not all that well done.

In vivid contrast, the Lucifer finale was wonderful – I had absolutely no idea how they would resolve this season's plot, but they did an excellent job, and it remains fun, humane, impressively sex-positive, and utterly surprising, especially for a show that teaotter and I initially watched just to see how impressively stupid and terrible it would be. I also love teaotter's fan theory that the actual reason that all the murder mysteries reflect Lucifer's current emotional processing is that the fact that God put Chloe Decker in Lucifer's path is just the tip of the iceberg, and he's been putting everything in Lucifer's path to "help" him.

Meanwhile, the Arrow season finale was somewhat mediocre – this was definitely a season where they needed to kill off the big bad earlier and switch to a secondary villain, since Prometheus' main character trait was being annoyingly smug, and that got old very rapidly indeed.

In a month, Killjoys returns, and I'm very much looking forward to that, and in the meantime, amberite and I will watch the rest of Sense8, which remains impressively excellent.